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The Developers Behind The Mir Display Server

Phoronix: The Developers Behind The Mir Display Server

Given Canonical's lack of upstream involvement with the development of X.Org, DRM, and Mesa/Gallium3D over the years, it was interesting to see who at the company is actually on-staff to work on the just-announced Mir Display Server for future releases of Ubuntu...

Seeing as these are developers who don't have years of experience working on the low-level Linux graphics stack from X.Org/DRM to Mesa/Gallium3D drivers or Wayland or even DirectFB, it will be interesting to see what they come up with for Mir...

No, it will not be "interesting". Nothing against these developers, but even if they do make a great product (which is unlikely, at least in the time-frame given) it will still only serve to fragment Linux driver support right at the moment things where picking up momentum due to Valve's involvement. Unless Canonical is still hiding something (which is likely) and already has NVidia/AMD on board (or is very close to) this can only be bad for the community at large, both developers and users. That said, even if they ARE on board, I'm hearing bad things about this CLA license.

Especially with a target to have it ready in an official Ubuntu desktop release in one year's time. It's taken X11 veterans years to get Wayland/Weston to the point where it is today and still isn't feature-complete.

An important thing to consider when you think about what they've said in the past...

Originally Posted by Mark Shuttleworth; http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551

I’m sure we could deliver *something* in six months, but I think a year is more realistic for the first images that will be widely useful in our community.

He goes on to say...

Originally Posted by Mark Shuttleworth

We considered and spoke with several proprietary options, on the basis that they might be persuaded to open source their work for a new push, and we evaluated the cost of building a new display manager, informed by the lessons learned in Wayland. We came to the conclusion that any such effort would only create a hard split in the world which wasn’t worth the cost of having done it. There are issues with Wayland, but they seem to be solvable, we’d rather be part of solving them than chasing a better alternative. So Wayland it is.

This way back in November of 2010...well, so much for that. I imagine Mir started as part of that ponderance, and continued in the background to one day land on someone's desk. That person said, "eureka! why didn't we think of this before?" And by that time Wayland, which they were only half paying attention to, had time to mature.

I cannot see how this will be successful without driver support from the big 3. Unless by chance they already have support from AMD, Intel and Nvidia. The madness coming from the Canonical camp just never ceases to amaze me.

Could it be that Wayland is slow to come to fruition because it's playing compatibility games, where as Mir is a clean approach.

On the face of it Mir seems to be the better project as it's geared to work with in a wide range of devices and systems. Having Android driver compatibility is a winner. While Microsoft is struggling to make it in the mobile market, spending billions on advertising, they have failed, yet Canonical's plans will work.

Could it be that Wayland is slow to come to fruition because it's playing compatibility games, where as Mir is a clean approach.

On the face of it Mir seems to be the better project as it's geared to work with in a wide range of devices and systems. Having Android driver compatibility is a winner. While Microsoft is struggling to make it in the mobile market, spending billions on advertising, they have failed, yet Canonical's plans will work.

Well, AFAIK Wayland doesn't really depend on KMS etc. Nothing stops it from running on/with android drivers, there is even the option of running it within X11.

Truth is, Canonical increasingly desperate about starting to make money one way or another. Ubuntu One > Ubuntu Store > Unity > Mir. They're Apple wannabes and if were up to them they'd turn the entire Linux into an iOS clone.